The Epic of Modernism

At the dawn of an age of trains, skyscrapers and industrial cities, Modernism appears as the spirit of a whole era, declaring an end to ornamented palaces and empty decoration and calling for honesty, simplicity and function. The book sets out its principles in turn: form follows function, a phrase coined by Louis Sullivan and embodied in the white Villa Savoye of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret floating on slender pilotis; honesty of materials, seen in the Seagram Building that Mies van der Rohe designed with Philip Johnson in New York; and simplicity of form, explored at the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart. Its social mission takes shape in Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, a raised block holding the idea of a city, and its beauty in Mies's claim that less is more, read as a call for discipline and clarity. Sullivan, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies and Frank Lloyd Wright carry this revolution from Paris to New York and from Berlin to Chicago, until it turns into a question of whether simplicity became coldness and a universal language became global sameness. The book concludes that the greatest legacy of Modernism was a question: whether a building can be honest, whether beauty can live without masks and whether less can truly contain more.